For the next two hours, the main hall became a torture chamber of grueling, agonizingly slow footwork.
Tutor Lin paced back and forth like a prison warden, shouting out corrections every three seconds. "Slower! Keep your chin tilted at a thirty-degree angle! Your left hip is swaying by half an inch! Horrible! Absolutely disgraceful! Again!"
Wen Yu walked with stiff, painful precision, his neck burning with exhaustion as he balanced the heavy books.
[Swaying by half an inch?!] Wen Yu fumed silently, his mind racing to keep himself from screaming out loud. [You old fossil! My balance is incredible! I used to stand on a moving subway car while holding a hot latte in one hand and editing a Chapter outline on my phone with the other! You wouldn’t survive two minutes in modern morning rush-hour traffic!]
"Enough!" Tutor Lin suddenly barked, sweeping the books off Wen Yu’s head with a harsh wave of his hand. "Your physical balance is crude, but your mental retention must be far worse! We shall now move to noble lineage cataloging! You must memorize all four hundred family crests and ancestral banners of the grand aristocratic houses by noon!"
The tutor unrolled a massive, twenty-foot parchment scroll across the long wooden floor, covered in hundreds of complex, intricate crest designs featuring dragons, lions, mountain peaks, and abstract silver symbols.
"You shall recite the first fifty crests, their founding dates, and their primary bloodline branches in order!" Tutor Lin declared maliciously, leaning back in his chair with a cup of hot tea, fully expecting the provincial maid to break down into helpless tears. "If you fail a single lineage, we shall start the entire list from the beginning!"
Wen Yu knelt down on the woven floor mat, staring at the chaotic wall of symbols. To an ordinary provincial servant who could barely read archaic court scripts, the task was an impossible, malicious trap designed to guarantee failure.
However, to a veteran modern webnovel editor who spent his entire career organizing complex world-building bibles, character family trees, and massive multi-volume lore sheets, the scroll was just an unformatted database.
[Four hundred crests without a spreadsheet?] Wen Yu scoffed internally, his mental voice bouncing back to life with supreme, chaotic confidence. [Please! This is just basic visual categorization! He grouped them by regional territories, but the symbol logic is completely repetitive! The northern houses all use predatory beasts with silver borders, the southern houses use plant motifs with gold filigree, and the eastern houses are obsessed with geometric wave patterns! This isn’t etiquette, this is just lazy character design!]
Wen Yu quickly pulled a stack of small, blank paper squares and an ink brush toward himself, his slender fingers moving with lightning speed as he began sketching simplified versions of each crest onto individual cards.
"What are you doing?!" Tutor Lin demanded, rising from his chair with a scowl. "I told you to recite, not scribble aimlessly like a toddler!"
"This humble one is merely... attempting to fix the shapes in my poor, foolish mind, Tutor Lin," Wen Yu murmured breathily, keeping his face down while his hands expertly cataloged the entire first section into categorized flashcard piles.
Under his breath, as he flipped through his newly created flashcard system, Wen Yu began muttering his modern mnemonic shortcuts, completely unaware of how completely unhinged he sounded to the watching instructor.
"Northern Wolf with three stars... okay, that’s Lord Stark’s budget knockoff house, founded year forty-two," Wen Yu whispered softly to himself, flipping a card with a quick flick of his wrist. "Golden Lotus with double ring... right, that’s the snobbish tea-monopoly family from Chapter eight. Silver Serpent with cross-hatching... oh, that’s Marquis Vane’s bankrupt estate, symbol category: petty villain background extra."
Tutor Lin stepped closer, his brow furrowing into deep, bewildered lines as he strained his ears to listen to the strange, rhythmic muttering. "What... what nonsense are you chanting under your breath?! ’Budget knockoff house’? ’Petty villain category’?! Speak proper courtly Mandarin!"
Wen Yu ignored the old man entirely, his editor brain locked into hyper-focus mode. He shuffled his paper flashcards with the speed of a professional casino dealer, laying them out in five neat, perfectly organized columns across the floor mat.
"Column A: Northern Defense Barons," Wen Yu muttered rapidly under his breath, his eyes darting across the cards. "Column B: Southern Agrarian Tax Evaders. Column C: Central Palace Parasites. Done! Entire database indexed and cross-referenced in twenty minutes!"
Tutor Lin stood frozen in the middle of the room, his jaw hanging open as he stared at the perfectly sorted columns of paper cards. He opened his mouth to deliver a furious reprimand, but before he could utter a word, Wen Yu raised his head, offering a sweet, perfectly innocent smile.
"This humble one is ready to recite all four hundred crests in order, Grand Tutor Lin," Wen Yu announced softly, his voice dripping with gentle, breathy humility. "Should I begin with the northern military houses, or would you prefer me to list them by their annual tax bracket?"
Tutor Lin stared at him in utter, speechless shock, his wooden ruler slipping from his hand and clattering noisily onto the stone floor.
"Tax brackets?!" Grand Tutor Lin sputtered, his withered face flushing a violent, mottled purple as he scrambled to scoop his wooden ruler off the stone floor. He pointed a trembling, ink-stained finger at the neatly arranged rows of paper cards. "You dare speak of the sacred ancestral lines of the founding dynasties as if they were common merchant ledgers?! This is outrageous! A total mockery of the imperial examination system!"
"This humble one begs for forgiveness if my crude study methods have offended your high academic sensibilities, Tutor Lin," Wen Yu murmured instantly, pitching his voice into a delicate, trembling register as he bowed his head until his forehead nearly touched the floor mat.
[Offended your sensibilities?] Wen Yu scoffed inside his head, his mental broadcast roaring with unhinged, high-octane laughter straight into Xie Yan’s telepathic frequency. [You mean offended your fragile aristocratic ego! You thought you could trap me with four hundred random crests, but my flashcard system just turned your terrifying five-hour hazing session into a twenty-minute speed-run! Cry harder, old man, your pedagogical methods are three hundred years out of date!]
In the doorway of the inner courtyard, Xie Yan stood quietly in the shadows of the carved wooden pillars, resting one hand casually on the pommel of his heavy sword. The general’s lips twitched upward in a slow, breathtaking smirk as he listened to his spouse’s chaotic mental victory lap. The cold, suffocating anger he had felt toward the Imperial Consort’s condescending tutor was entirely replaced by an overwhelming sense of profound, dark amusement.
Tutor Lin straightened his spine, smoothing down his long grey beard with a harsh, rigid snap of his wrist. "Do not celebrate yet, Consort Wen! Memorandum of crests is merely a test of parrot-like repetition! A true consort of the Supreme General must possess deep, nuanced comprehension of imperial jurisprudence and historical lineage precedent!"
The old tutor strode over to the main table, unrolling a heavy, yellowed parchment scroll that bore the golden wax seal of the Imperial Academy. A nasty, triumphant glint returned to his small, narrow eyes.
"We shall test your knowledge of historical legal traps!" Tutor Lin declared, his voice echoing through the vaulted hall with theatrical authority. "During the Third Reign of the Great Southern Dynasty, Prince Chen claimed the right of succession through his maternal aunt’s noble lineage despite his father’s formal exile. Tell me, Consort Wen, under the Imperial Lineage Edict of Year Forty-Six, why was his ascension declared legally valid by the Supreme Court of Elders?"